Marsalis shook his head again. ‘Deliberate, absolutely. He’d be paying attention for that stuff.’
‘He makes it back to the base, gets off the base somehow. I’d guess that’s not hard. Got to be a hundred different outs for someone with Merrin’s training. Security’s going to be focused on incoming personnel anyway, not the graveyard shift going home. And with all this breaking loose, everyone’s running around like a Jesusland snake handling meet.’ She stopped. ‘Wait a minute, what about the quarantine?’
Norton sighed. ‘Fudged. They applied it, made the announcement on the way back. Everyone through the nanoscan. Apparently.’ Irony lay heavy on the word. ‘No one at Filigree Steel realised Driscoll didn’t take the scan.’
Marsalis grunted. ‘Or by the time they realised, it was too late and they just covered their arses.’
‘Yeah, well, in any case, quarantine cleared inside the first couple of hours. Some biohazard outfit down from Seattle, they checked the hull for contaminants before it was towed. If someone at Filigree Steel was covering their asses, they knew they were safe bylunchtime.’
Sevgi nodded gloomily. ‘And by the time we’d get to digging any deeper with Filigree Steel, Ward shows up dead so we assume that’s how Merrin got ashore, and we don’t bother. What a fucking mess.’
‘It’s classic insurgency technique,’ Marsalis said. ‘Misdirect, cover your tracks.’
‘Can you sound a little less fucking impressed, please?’
In the interview room, they were done. Zdena Tovbina was escorted out, ostentatiously checking her watch. Rovayo stayed behind, played a long, weary glance through the one-way glass to the gallery as if she could see the three of them sitting there.
‘That’s all, folks,’ she said.
‘He planned this.’ Sevgi was still talking to make herself believe it. ‘He opened up the cryocaps and ripped the bodies apart to create a fucking diversion.’
‘Yeah.’ Marsalis got up to leave. ‘And you guys thought he’d just gone crazy.’
Coyle and Rovayo had been busy. There was a full CSI virtual up and running for Joey Driscoll’s death, including a gruesomely modelled corpse recovery site. They stood, briefly, in fathomless, lamp-lit blue and Driscoll peered down at them out of the tangled cabling, one puffy hand waving gently in the current. A CSI ’face reached up helpfully and pulled in magnified detail that Sevgi, syn or no syn, could really have done without. Driscoll’s eyes were gone, and the ear lobes, the mouth eaten back to a lopsided harelip snarl, and the whole swollen face gone waxy with adipocere seepage through the skin from the subcutaneous fat layers beneath. Sevgi’d seen worse, much worse, fished out of the Hudson or the East River every so often, but it was all a long time ago, and now the illusion of floating beneath the waterlogged corpse in the depths of the ocean kept triggering an impulse to hold her breath.
‘You said forensics have been over the apartment,’ she said. ‘Any chance of seeing that?’
Coyle nodded. ‘Sure. We all done here?’
‘I think so,’ said Norton uncomfortably.
Marsalis nodded impassively.
‘Full shift, datahome six,’ Coyle told the ’face, and the drowned blue murk amped up to a blinding flash of white, then soaked back out into the sombre colours of cheap rental accommodation. Driscoll had either been saving for something better, or maybe didn’t rate home environment as much of a budget priority. The furniture was functional and worn, the walls carried generic corporate promo artwork from what looked like a string of different employers. A window gave them a view of what must be an identical apartment building twenty metres away across an alley.
Sevgi breathed in relief.
‘You got matching genetic trace?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’ Rovayo pointed, and all around the room tiny scuffs of transparent red lit up on the furniture and fittings. ‘He was definitely here. Used the place for a couple of days at least.’
Marsalis went to the window and peered out. ‘Any sightings? Eye-witnesses? ’
The female Rim detective frowned. ‘Not much from witnesses, no. These blocks are purpose built for immigrant labor. Tenant turnover’s high, and people keep pretty much to themselves. There’s some security video from the corridors, but not much of that either. It looks like he took out most of the surveillance equipment in the block right after he got here. They didn’t get around to fixing it for a couple of weeks.’
‘Pretty standard,’ Marsalis muttered.
‘Yeah, right,’ Coyle growled. ‘And I suppose you don’t got immigrant labour slums in the Euro-fucking-Union.’
The black man flickered a glance at him.
‘I was talking about the surveillance take-down. Pretty standard urban penetration procedure.’
‘Oh.’
‘You want to see some of what we did get?’ Rovayo asked. She was already gesturing a viewpatch screen into existence on the empty air. Marsalis shrugged and shifted from the window.
‘Sure. Can’t hurt.’
So they all watched at a foreshortening camera angle as Merrin walked gaunt and hollow-eyed through the block lobby, stared thoughtfully up at the lens for a moment, and then walked on again. Sevgi, watching Marsalis as well, thought she saw the black man stiffen slightly as Merrin seemed to look up at them all from the screen. She wasn’t sure what he saw there to tighten him like that, maybe just a worthy opponent. For her, the moment flip-flopped abruptly in her head, Merrin looking up, the corpse of Joey Driscoll looking down, corpse and killer, little windows opening out of time to let the dead and destructive peer in. Fucking virtual formats. Copied worlds, no place for anything but ghosts and the machine perfection of the ’faces drifting between, administering it all with the inhuman competence of angels.
She wondered suddenly if that was what the paradise the imams talked about would be like. Ghosts and angels, and no place for anything human or warm.
‘We’ve got a problem here,’ she said, to dispel the sudden, creeping sense of doom. ‘If this is how Merrin got off Horkan’s Pride, then—’
‘Yeah.’ Coyle finished it for her. ‘How does he end up at Ward Biosupply the same afternoon, painting the dock with Ulysses Ward’s blood?’
‘More important than how,’ said Marsalis quietly. ‘You might want to wonder why?’
Coyle and Rovayo shared a look. Sevgi wrote the subtitles. Who knows why the fuck an unluck twist does anything? She wasn’t sure if Marsalis caught it too.
Norton cleared his throat. ‘Ward was out there. The satellite footage and the filed sub plans prove it. We’ve assumed that was coincidence, his bad luck he happened to be in the region. He rescued Merrin from the wreck and got murdered for his kindness.’
‘Big assumption,’ said Marsalis, less quietly.
‘We didn’t assume anything.’ Irritable tiredness in Rovayo’s voice. Now Sevgi thought about it, neither of the Rim cops looked as if they’d had a lot of sleep recently. ‘We ran background checks on Ward at the time. COLIN-approved security n-djinn. There’s no evidence of a link to Merrin, or Mars generally.’
‘There is now. Maybe you just didn’t dig deep enough.’
Coyle bristled. ‘What the fuck do you know about it? You some kind of cop all of a sudden?’
‘Some kind of, yeah.’
‘Marsalis, you’re full of shit. You’re a licensed hit-man at best, and from what I hear, you weren’t even very good at that. They bailed your ass out of a Florida jail for this job, right?’
Marsalis smiled faintly.